This invention relates to wristwatch radiotelephones, and more particularly to wristwatch radiotelephones which can be used as a radiotelephone without removing the apparatus from the user's wrist.
A number of wristwatch radiotelephone structures have been proposed. Some of these structures are intended to be wholly or partly removed from the user's wrist and held in his or her hand when the apparatus is to be used as a radiotelephone (see, for example, Olsen U.S. Pat. No. 4,847,818, Yoshitake U.S. Pat. No. 5,008,864, Seager U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,214,623, 5,218,577, 5,228,012, 5,235,560, 5,235,561, and 5,274,613, Thorp U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,224,076 and 5,251,189, and Houlihan U.S. Pat. No. 5,260,915). Others of these structures require the temporary addition of another component to the wristwatch for radiotelephone use (see, for example, Japanese patent document 59-56586 and FIGS. 8 and 9 of the above-mentioned Yoshitake patent). The reason these devices must be removed from the wrist and/or temporarily augmented by additional components is that, on the wrist and unaugmented, they tend to be too small to provide a microphone and a speaker that are sufficiently far apart to enable the microphone and speaker to be simultaneously placed near the user's mouth and ear, respectively. Thus many of the known structures are removed from the wrist so that they can be elongated to increase the linear distance between a microphone and a speaker. Alternatively or additionally, a remote speaker or a speaker extension is temporarily plugged into the wristwatch in order to provide sufficiently widely spaced input and output voice ports.
Some users of this type of equipment may find it inconvenient or undesirable to have to remove the wristwatch from the wrist in order to use it as a radiotelephone. It is also believed undesirable to require the temporary addition of another element to the wristwatch when radiotelephone use is desired. The additional element must somehow be carried separately from the wristwatch, and thus it may be more easily lost or damaged.
In view of the foregoing, it is an object of this invention to provide improved wristwatch radiotelephone apparatus.
It is a more particular object of this invention to provide wristwatch radiotelephone apparatus which can be conveniently used as a radiotelephone without requiring the user to remove the apparatus from his or her wrist, and without requiring the temporary addition of other elements to the apparatus.